Yoplait - Sustainability

Each day we try to be a little better than the day before by focusing on helping women and their families lead healthy, sustainable lives: today, tomorrow, and into the future.

At Yoplait, we foster a culture built upon integrity, commitment and citizenship. That’s why we are committed not only to providing a nutritious, great-tasting yogurt, but also to giving back to our communities. Yoplait has given more than 25 million dollars to the breast cancer cause through programs like Save Lids to Save Lives. We also volunteer our time in support of wonderful organizations like Crisis Nursery, which works towards strengthening families and supporting kids, and Camp Sunrise, a multicultural summer camping program. In addition to supporting our communities, we are also committed to reducing our environmental impact. Here’s where we are focusing our efforts.

Whether you are making a meal, building a house, or raising a child, getting the basics right is essential. At Yoplait, we start with the basics too. For us, it is pretty simple: regionally-sourced high-quality milk, the farmers who produce it and the environment around us.

It feels good to know where your food is from and that it hasn’t traveled across continents to get to you. We make our yogurt in different regions across the country and have partnered with dairy cooperatives in each of those regions to supply us with milk. This is a win for you and for the planet – fresher milk and fewer road miles. In 2009, we began sourcing the milk used at our Carson, CA plant from a cooperative that is 175 miles closer than our previous source. We also reduced the milk shipments at our Methuen, MA plant by switching from truck to rail transportation. All of this adds up to our yogurt traveling 1.8 million fewer miles per year.

We are embarking on a journey in partnership with cooperatives and organizations like Dairy Management (DMI). Go to www.usdairy.com/sustainability to find out more about how the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, which is supported and staffed by DMI, is working on sustainability initiatives that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Through these partnerships we are striving to support dairy industry-wide sustainability goals, increase farmer participation in sustainability groups and enable better tracking and use of natural resources such as land and water. We will be connecting farmers so they can learn from each other, spread sustainable farming practices and help ensure that the farms we count on will be around for the next generation.

Today, less is the new more. When it comes to the environment, the less we create the more we help preserve nature and our natural resources. That is why Yoplait is committed to looking for ways to reduce the impact of our packaging on the environment.

We are making big strides in reducing the amount of plastic in our yogurt cups. We have introduced a new oval-shaped cup design in club stores that uses less plastic and allows us to ship the cups closer together. This design has already saved more than two million pounds of plastic per year and we will be rolling it out more broadly in the near future.

This is significant progress, but we know we still have more to do. That’s why we are working diligently to reduce the amount of plastic in all of our yogurt cups. Over the next two years, our goal is to reduce the amount of plastic that gets released into the environment by nine million pounds annually. This is no easy feat, but our team is committed to making it happen for the good of the planet.

At Yoplait, we are making significant progress in reducing our environmental impact. Sustainability, however, is a long-term journey. To that end, our packaging developers are working hard internally and partnering externally to try to find ways to make our cups more sustainable in the future. We are constantly evaluating new materials and new processes that we believe will lead to breakthrough packaging formats that are even better for the environment.